:æ;-:, _ _,A f/f:.l%..'#, , " ."",,,;::flJb,J , : '! > _*"3tww ,:,,N: j{ü''''''îæ ;. u.. .J1j - --'. ';'f; , /'t ,. lib but, of course, he does employ a crack team of show-business experts: his agent, Richard Lovett, is the president of Creative Artists Agency. "Yes, I am a celebrity," he told an interviewer in Venice, making the sentence sound as if it were an ugly confession. One morn- ing in October in a hotel suite in Nash- ville, where he was shooting an adapta- tion of Stephen King's "The Green Mile," he called to order fresh coffee, then imagined the room-service panic downstairs: "They're all running around. 'Mr. Hanks wants a pot of coffee. I'll take it! I'll take it!' " When Hanks is talking to foreign- ers, his chronic American irony doesn't necessarily pIa)!. In his first interview in Venice, a translator served as his inter- mediary to two dozen Italian journalists. ' I the first this morning? Make a note of that. Everyone's fresh. No one's cranky." They didn't smile. Someone asked about Steven Spielberg, who di- rected "Saving Private Ryan," and Hanks called him "a chucklehead," and said, "I want to slap him sometimes. Not that I have." The journalists didn't smile. Someone else asked if "Private Ryan" would lead to a resuscitation of the war- movie genre. "It had been declared dead by those incredible crack show-business experts who run motion pictures," Hanks said. He turned to his translator and said, "You'll translate that in a way that makes them laugh?" The Italians still didn't laugh, and he finally gave up. :: ;:%.':-_- \W! t h.._ --"g q;tit::.J r",A >>..", 'ó',qf1t4t::; :}!; . "> :):_ n.. <<.. "::#" .. . . . i : ,11 : :_;;;. t I fi "" . ,-, 't)':;4f :",;,::/. ,; '" :;; .. -h ' J i\1; t H:!" _, ! ;_}{;:"1;:: '< f :'m"'_ r- "":, if? .::;:: .: ::-:: .. :::::. ::::;:. :,:,:.- ...:,-.'" J> ;r i Hanks's reflexive irony owes a lot to Steve Martin, whom he sees as a pivotal cultural figure. "If you went to Cub Scout meetings in the seventies, they'd do Steve Martin bits," Hanks said. "Everybody was 'Yeah, I'm a wild and crazy gu)!.' In- stantaneousl)T, it just seemed to permeate society It was like a comet-white-hot at the front, and then the intensity kind of dissipated as all society changed, be- cause of Steve Martin. And now every- thing is essentially like that. The sense of humor really hasn't changed that much." Part of Hanks's appeal is his boyish- ness, which is evident when he talks about his job. "The thing I like about working in films is it's a blast," he said. Discussing the filming of "Private Ryan," he told me, "We got to dress up as Army men and carry cool weapons." Yet Hanks also displays a very grown- up moral seriousness. About the "mes- " f " p . R " h . d " I ' sage 0 rlvate yan, e sal, t s ambiguous in the exact fashion that the experience was. Is it worth risking eight men for one? There is no answer. The vast majority of movies that are going to try to communicate something do it in ways so there's just no question what the filmmaker's point is. 'These people were bad' or 'Cancer is a terrible thing.' " Hanks is serious about yeoman-actor professionalism as well-being punctual, knowing lines, chatting with the crew. He seems to think of himself as a sort of super-duper character actor. "He carries with him a sort of very old-fashioned Jl f': . .-{.H 'I \ 1 1 :: ... u, A:-';;.. -.:- :. , '1.: , , , fð':o. ,:,/t;;;", ::..;/';': 1-:.::x::.":' .;'.. t:: ::: ?::: .:It. :,:...::{=-:;" "'I ,""":":::-::;: '.- 1 ß g .f/IIJ' ....... . *,,;-,' : - , . -:";';,'::,:- "Mr. Curtis can't come to the phone right now. He's in the time-out chair. " THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7 8:, 14, 1998 pull-up-your-socks, let's-get-the-job- done, there' s-no-crying-in- baseball-or- in-any-other-aspects-of-my-life kind of thing," Nora Ephron said. "The older I get, the more interested I am in people who are not going to tell you their in- nermost hopes and fears. It's what he's pulling all these performances out oE But he isn't going to tell anyone about it, partly because it's none of your busi- ness, and partly because it's bad man- ners. It's America at its finest, at its most absolutely pre-Freudian finest." H ANKS'S attraction to old-fashioned mid-century Americanism is thorough. He has an overriding interest in the big sweep and the tiny artifacts of the American century from the thirties through the sixties. When I asked him what he'd been reading, he said he had just bought A. Scott Berg's biographies of Charles Lindbergh and Maxwell Per- kins. The one TV show he made a point of watching recently was "The Cold War," on CNN. A number of times, he compared his generation's experience to that of his parents: "What is the great national consciousness we have partici- pated in? The rock-and-roll culture. Not hugely demanding of us from the point of view of sacrifice." He has a produc- tion company that he named Playtone, as if he were a Brill Building impresario from 1964. He uses (earnestly and iron- ically) corny vintage phrases such as "jeepers creepers," "for crying out loud," and "Oh, landy." He collects portable manual typewriters, and the model he longs to find is called a Skywriter, which, he said, "was made specifically for using on the fold-down trays of the first trans- continental passenger planes." Although he's nostalgic about the era of his boyhood, his personal fifties and sixties weren't particularly golden. His parents separated when he was five, and he was brought up by his father and two successive stepmothers in tatty apart- ments and houses in California and Nevada, with a shifting array of siblings and many step-siblings. His father was a kitchen manager, and worked long hours. Yet Hanks told me that his up- bringing has been depicted in the press as unhappier than it really was. His fa- ther is dead, he said, and his mother lives in Northern California. I asked if he's in contact with her. He said, "See, the thing is I never lived with my mom. So she s